Colin Sinclair's Blog, page 7

What’s going on

The plan was to do a bit more blog stuff this year, keep things ticking over, stay up to date with gaming and writing projects as the weeks and months went on. So, that’s going well…

Gaming

Anyway, the gaming group have just finished a short, scrappy, some might say cursed, sequence of Cyberpunk games. Like the 2020 game itself it was all Very 80s. Rogue cops, a dodgy Doc, a media-babe with a bunny-girl makeover.

There were drugs, high technology corporate sleaze, old (dead) friends, sentient...

randoms xv: it starts with the hands

I had a dream about people turning into cows. Not actual cows, more a kind of Gerald-Scarfe-Pink-Floyd-video grotesquery of lumpen bovine humanity. It starts with the hands and feet, maybe, becoming useless club-like stubs at the ends of spindly limbs. The rest of the body is bulked out, the epidermis peeling away to leave dun coloured patches of blubbery flesh. The face is elongated, snout like, the ears are curved protrusions of stretched skin. In a certain light I guess they do look more l...

#RPGaDay 2017: Day 31

Question 31: What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018?

In terms of the gaming community, I’ve no real idea as I basically just noodle away doing whatever gaming is available and pay very little attention to the wider gaming fellowship beyond what passes before my gaze on Facebook or the occasional blog.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on new Runequest, new Stars Without Number, and also a game about language called Dialect.

Going to attempt to run Lamentati...

#RPGaDay 2017: Day 30

Question 30: What is an RPG genre-mashup you would most like to see?

Urban fantasy and anthropomorphic animals. I think that would be cool. I have an idea for a novel ticking over at the moment (called The Crow Boy, there’s bits of it scattered about this blog), which features magic, steampunk style crazy science, old gods and new deities; all wrapped up in a tale about birds and cats and surly rats. I think there’s probably a game there too.

Other options for mash-ups:

Buffy the Vampire Slay...

#RPGaDAY 2017: Days 21 to 29

Question 21: Which RPG does the most with the least words?

 

The original Recon game from RPG, Inc was about forty pages long iirc, and that certainly seemed to pack a lot in to very little.

I get the impression/seem to remember that a most of the early stuff had a very low (initial) page count, and that later editions seem to sprawl a little bit more – extra system, more background, general mission creep.

Also worth considering there’s all that short-cut/kind of cheating stuff where the pla...

#RPGaDAY 2017: Days 14 to 20

(In which everything gets left to the last minute and I do a couple or three round-up posts instead of one a day)

Question 14: Which RPG do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

As my games tend towards endless sprawl, I’m happy for any system to be used for on-going campaigns. Case in point, the supers-in-Berlin-1950s game I’ve been running for a while, I already have it in my mind that I can step forward to the 60s at some point and keep the same world rolling along. Then the 1970s and...

randoms vii: waste ground poppies

“You can’t walk up and stick a bullet in this guy. That’s just-”

Albrecht knows better. “I’m a pretty good shot.”

“Ain’t what I mean,” Mato says. Shakes his head. His face is hard to read in the dimness of this makeshift bar. “That’s not it at all.”

Albrecht sighs, runs a slow hand across her buzzcut hair; she’s got bandages and splints on a couple of her fingers, bruises fading across her knuckles. “Okay,” she says at last. “Let’s have it then. Everything you know.”

Mato gives her nothing.

A...

#RPGaDAY2015: Part Eight, the Last Patrol

Day Thirty-one: Favourite non-RPG thing to come out of an RPG?

I’d been working on a post-apocalyptic novel called COLD MERIDIAN when I first encountered the game Apocalypse World, and it probably influenced the general feel of the book in a great many ways.

A year or so later on, with the novel still very much a work-in-progress, I played in a session of Apocalypse World at the Q-con games convention in Belfast, and decided to choose a character book that suited one of the characters I’d bee...

#RPGaDAY2015: Part Seven, Island of the Lizard King

Day Twenty-six: Favourite inspiration for your game?

Music.

I’ve had a few characters, campaigns etc sparked off by watching a particular movie (for example I think the recent NOAH film might make a neat Apocalypse World hack) but in the main I think it’s music that does it. There’s a different buzz for creation there.

Anything from Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan to Gary Numan and Heaven 17; not to mention everything inbetween/around/before/after.

I’m never sure if the music is the inspiration its...

#RPGaDAY2015: Part Six, the Savage Horde

Day Twenty One: Favourite RPG setting?

Well, clearly there’s Glorantha, but on the other hand there is also what’s known as the NEARSIDE from Broken Rooms (the RPG formerly known as THE NEARSIDE PROJECT). It’s published by Greymalkin Designs who are also responsible for the ‘high fantasy brought low’ game DESOLATION.

Broken Rooms is mostly written by Stephen Herron, and deals with thirteen alternate versions of Earth, where things are going very badly indeed.

There’s a world struck by an aste...